Elections and Media

As the debate intensifies around Russian ad buys in the US election, a fundamental aspect of Facebook’s platform has gone mostly overlooked. Facebook’s auction-based system rewards ads that draw engagement from users by making them cheaper, serving them to more users for less money. But the mechanics that apply to commercial ads apply to political ones as well.

Facebook has created a powerful system that dynamically, and unpredictably, changes the prices of political ads. The system also encourages polarization by incentivizing ads that users are predisposed to agree with. Unless Facebook makes its internal data public, it’s impossible to say which ads reach which audiences, or how much candidates spend to reach them.

On Oct 9, Twitter blocked a campaign video ad from Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), calling the ad “inflammatory” and claiming that it violated the company’s ad guidelines. On Oct 10, Twitter changed its mind. Rep Blackburn can now promote the video, in which the self-described “hardcore, card carrying Tennessee conservative” talked about her efforts to stop “the sale of baby body parts,” in a reference to Planned Parenthood. “After further review, we have made the decision to allow the content in question from Rep. Blackburn's campaign ad to be promoted on our ads platform,” a Twitter spokesperson said. “While we initially determined that a small portion of the video used potentially inflammatory language, after reconsidering the ad in the context of the entire message, we believe that there is room to refine our policies around these issues. We have notified Rep. Blackburn's campaign of this decision."

A group of lawyers who served in former President Barack Obama's administration has moved for a temporary injunction against President Donald Trump's voter fraud commission, seeking to block it from accessing voter roll data from all 50 states.

The Protect Democracy Project, headed by two former associate White House counsels to Obama, claimed in court documents that President Trump's voter fraud probe caused an "immediate blow to the proper functioning of our democracy" by requesting the data without following proper legal procedures. "We're going to be arguing that it's going to be vital for the court to take action right away," Protect Democracy attorney Larry Schwartztol told the news service.

A division of the Library of Congress could play a key role in ensuring future US elections are protected against cyberattacks that alter vote tallies or other digital meddling, the authors of a major report on election hacking said. That division, the US Copyright Office, approved a slate of exemptions to a 1996 copyright law that give ethical hackers more leeway to search for digital vulnerabilities in products without facing legal threats from companies that don’t want their security gaps exposed. The exemption, which came out shortly after the 2016 election, included a specific provision freeing ethical hackers to poke and prod at voting machines. That provision paved the way for a “voting machine hacking village” at the 2017 DEF CON security conference in Las Vegas in July that turned up cyber vulnerabilities in numerous voting systems. If the exemption is allowed to expire in 2018, however, it could leave future elections more vulnerable to nation-state and criminal hackers.

YouTube videos of police beatings on American streets. A widely circulated internet hoax about Muslim men in Michigan collecting welfare for multiple wives. A local news story about two veterans brutally mugged on a freezing winter night. All of these were recorded, posted or written by Americans. Yet all ended up becoming grist for a network of Facebook pages linked to a shadowy Russian company that has carried out propaganda campaigns for the Kremlin, and which is now believed to be at the center of a far-reaching Russian program to influence the 2016 presidential election. A New York Times examination of hundreds of those posts shows that one of the most powerful weapons that Russian agents used to reshape American politics was the anger, passion and misinformation that real Americans were broadcasting across social media platforms.

“This is cultural hacking,” said Jonathan Albright, research director at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. “They are using systems that were already set up by these platforms to increase engagement. They’re feeding outrage — and it’s easy to do, because outrage and emotion is how people share.”

The Federal Election Commission is asking for public input on its disclosure rules for online political advertisements, as companies like Facebook and Google are being scrutinized by investigators for ads they ran during the 2016 presidential campaign. The FEC announced that they would be reopening the public comment period on the rules nearly a year after the last time they sought public input on the disclosure requirement.

“In light of developments since the close of the last comment period, the Commission is reopening the comment period once again to consider disclaimer requirements as applied to certain internet communications,” the announcement reads. The move comes as some lawmakers are pressing for tighter disclosure requirements in the wake of Facebook’s revelation that it had uncovered 3,000 political ads purchased by Russian actors. During the 2012 election cycle, Facebook and Google had both received exemptions from the FEC’s rules requiring that political ads feature a disclosure indicating who paid for them.

House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Marsha Blackburn’s (R-TN) Senate campaign announcement ad has been blocked by Twitter over a statement the abortion rights opponent makes about the sale of fetal tissue for medical research. Chairman Blackburn, who is running for the seat being opened by the retirement of Sen Bob Corker (R-TN), boasts in the ad that she “stopped the sale of baby body parts.”

A Twitter representative told the candidate’s vendors on Oct 10 that the statement was “deemed an inflammatory statement that is likely to evoke a strong negative reaction." Twitter said the Blackburn campaign would be allowed to run the rest of the video if the flagged statement is omitted. While the decision keeps Chairman Blackburn from paying to promote the video on Twitter, it doesn’t keep it from being linked from YouTube and other platforms. Chairman Blackburn took to Twitter to urge supporters to re-post her video and join her in “standing up to Silicon Valley.”

Google for the first time has uncovered evidence that Russian operatives exploited the company’s platforms in an attempt to interfere in the 2016 election, apparently.

The Silicon Valley giant has found that tens of thousands of dollars were spent on ads by Russian agents who aimed to spread disinformation across Google’s many products, which include YouTube, as well as advertising associated with Google search, Gmail, and the company’s DoubleClick ad network. Google runs the world’s largest online advertising business, and YouTube is the world’s largest online video site. The discovery by Google is also significant because the ads do not appear to be from the same Kremlin-affiliated troll farm that bought ads on Facebook -- a sign that the Russian effort to spread disinformation online may be a much broader problem than Silicon Valley companies have unearthed so far.

The Trump presidential campaign spent most of its digital advertising budget on Facebook, testing more than 50,000 ad variations each day in an attempt to micro-target voters, President Donald Trump’s digital director, Brad Parscale, told CBS’s 60 Minutes in an interview scheduled to air Oct 8. “Twitter is how [Trump] talked to the people, Facebook was going to be how he won,” Parscale said. Facebook provided Trump 2016 with employees who embedded in the campaign’s digital office and helped educate staffers on how to use Facebook ads, he said. Because he “wanted people who supported Donald Trump”, Parscale said, the Facebook employees were questioned on their political views. “Campaigns aren’t able to hand-pick Facebook team members to work on their projects,” the statement read, in apparent reference to Parscale’s claim, as reported by CBS, that the Facebook employees that served as “embeds” in his office “had to be partisan and he questioned them to make sure”. Parscale said the Trump campaign used Facebook to reach clusters of rural voters, such as “15 people in the Florida Panhandle that I would never buy a TV commercial for”. “I started making ads that showed the bridge crumbling,” he said. “I can find the 1,500 people in one town that care about infrastructure. Now, that might be a voter that normally votes Democrat.”

Russian trolls and others aligned with the Kremlin are injecting disinformation into streams of online content flowing to American military personnel and veterans on Twitter and Facebook, according to an Oxford University study released Oct 9. The researchers found fake or slanted news from Russian-controlled accounts are mixing with a wide range of legitimate content consumed by veterans and active-duty personnel in their Facebook and Twitter news feeds. These groups were found to be reading and sharing articles on conservative political thought, articles on right-wing politics in Europe and writing touting various conspiracy theories. In some cases, the disinformation reached the friends and families of military personnel and veterans as well, the researchers said. But it was not always clear who was creating the content.